Tom: Great poem, great photos. Thanks, as always. Hine was pretty amazing. We used one of his best-known photos when I was at the Indian museum on the assumption that some of these guys had to be Mohawk.

With that top photo, Hine's captioning data suggests he wanted to make the point that a fair percentage of these "high steel" workers were well along in years, and though being young, spry and nimble were obviously useful advantages in such work, the skill and courage of the veterans was also a significant resource.

(Maxim Gorky, despite his formidable genius, had never before scaled such heights...)

Terry, it was famously told that many of these workers-in-the sky came from the Indian tribes of the Northeast, and said that they "knew no fear" even at such dizzying, vertiginous heights... but looking at these photos, the racial/ethnic makeup of the cast seems just about as various as would be found in almost any mix of individuals from the working (as opposed to the WASP exec and country-club) classes.

Digging a bit further, Terry, one learns that the Mohawk and Iroquois workers in the perilous sky-rise construction jobs at the Empire State and other skyscrapers and bridges were offered "special contracts," entailing lower than average wages and limited union membership. (Now there's a surprise.)

An interesting National Film Board of Canada doc on the Native American "tradition" in that dangerous profession:

I notice that TC hasn't said anything about his vertigo. It's a remarkable person who wouldn't be concerned about these heights. The first time, you must have to literally work your way up; start by building the ground floor and climb one storey higher every week.

I had to hold my hands over my eyes while making this post so as not to pass out.

It was a case of "daring oneself to do it".

Almost as legendary as my vertigo is my mania for enlargement (wait, this is sounding like the dialogue in a male enhancement commercial...).

It caused me to initially make the top photo, of Maxim Gorky out on that ultimate limb high over the tallest skyscrapers on earth, so large that it dwarfed the body of the computer, and, even while the post remained resting quietly on the runway, threatened to tip the universe, now become terrifyingly precarious, entirely out of its orbit.

Robb, how can I have neglected to mention that your new website is a source of many wonders?

Highly recommended, and a worthy compliment to its ~otto~man-empire doppelgänger, upon which, as you will note, it now looks down (though not from a very great height) in my humble marginal links column.

The thing about these Hine photos is that the daring and risk needed to make them put the photographer on a par with his subjects'. Given the kind of equipment he would have been using, the miracle isn't that these men were working this way, at this height, but that a photographer had been able to make these images at all.

We have our Galen Rowells holding little 35's while clinging to a scaling rope on sheer rock faces, but Hine's magic was a parallel jeopardy. And then there are the guys who make videos while sky-diving.

A jinglisi is a good thing to have on a high wire if you've dropped your balancing pole, I hear.

Curtis, of all the terrifying aspects of these images, the most terrifying of all, for me, is the thought of Lewis Hine's role up there in the sky; and when I consider that, an even stronger feeling comes over me, the sense of wonder I feel when I grasp the concentration that must have been required on his part.